How Iran Became an Undemocratic Democracy

Presidential elections in Iran raise a puzzling contradiction: How can the government include both an unelected supreme leader and a president who is chosen in votes that are treated as serious contests?

Put another way, is Iran a democracy or a dictatorship?

Citizens elect the president, as they will on Friday, as well as members of a legislature. But they are overseen by institutions staffed by clerics. One, known as the Guardian Council, approves all candidates for office, narrowing the scope of elections. Still other unelected bodies, like the Revolutionary Guards, wield tremendous power.

The supreme leader, who holds the position for life, is the most important figure, overseeing everything.

The system began with a series of hurried political compromises amid the country’s 1979 revolution. The end result was an Islamic republic, meant to combine democratic involvement with theocratic oversight. In practice, the two often clash, with unelected, unaccountable officials holding the most power.

The result has been 38 years of weak democracy but strong politics. Political factions, each with a base of support, compete through elections, and for influence among powerful bureaucracies.

Over the years, although the government has remained broadly authoritarian, it has oscillated among degrees of democracy. Those fluctuations, while subtle, have often coincided with elections like the one this week.